Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [116]
‘You were always as difficult to deal with. You don’t know what you are doing,’ he said.
‘That may be true; but at least I know what you are doing.’
Ignoring the man’s blade, he climbed slowly down that vast shaggy flank. They lowered themselves until they could reach a slender bough, helping the submissive Arablers to gain a foothold. With a wonderful gladness in his heart, Gren looked down into the leafy depths of the forest.
‘Come on,’ he said encouragingly. ‘This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learnt will guard us! Give me your hand, Yattmur.’
Together they climbed down into a bower of leaves. They did not look back as the traverser with its passengers rose slowly, slowly floated from the jungle up into the green-flecked sky, and headed for the solemn blues of space.
Afterword
One hot and golden day long ago, I hired a boatman to ferry me across the River Hoogley to the Calcutta Botannical Gardens. There I spent an afternoon gazing at a famous Indian banyan tree. A notice proclaimed it to be the biggest tree in the world: not in height but in circumference.
Great care was taken of this phenomenal tree. The banyan stretches out its branches horizontally; from these branches, roots extend downward into the ground, and so the tree creeps forward in all directions. It was old, and many branches were propped by forked sticks, painted white. The effect was as if Salvador Dalí had taken up arboriculture.
On my return to England, I discovered that Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, had written of this tree in an article, ‘The Meaning of Death’, in the Cornhill. That article appeared in the 1920s when, according to Huxley, the tree covered two acres. How many more acres does it cover today, I wonder.
The England to which I returned in the early fifties was a great disappointment. Whereas I had adjusted to the squalor and poverty of India, I hated the squalor and poverty, allied to the depressing climate, of my homeland. I had no connections. No money. I resolved to forget the East – ‘the splendour and havoc of the East’, as William Kinglake nobly calls it. There seemed no other way to come to terms with my new life.
Yet the outrageous sub-continent of India, the pagodas and hardships of Burma, the broken-down beauty of Sumatra and its people, the cleanliness of Singpore, the swarming delights of Hong Kong, and all those rivers and warm seas in which my friends and I had swum – and that Dalí-like banyan – remained ineradically in mind
Exorcism was required. It was towards the end of 1960 that I wrote a short story called ‘Hothouse’ and sent it to the American Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There it was published in February 1961. It caught, as they say, ‘on’. I had imagined the tree covering the world, encouraged by global warming, as the Sun began to go nova.
The magazine editor kept asking for more. So I was able to write of the journey of Gren and his friends.
I was not particularly well-acquainted with the tribal customs of science-fiction readers. I had not heard of the Hugo Award, the SF equivalent of an Oscar in the movies. However, one fine morning in 1962, my girlfriend went out to collect from her doorstep her pint of milk and found there a strange object wrapped in an Irish newspaper. When unwrapped, this proved to be a Hugo Award for Hothouse and short fiction. I had the impression that possibly my luck was turning.
The complete Hothouse, as you see it now, was published in hardcover by Faber & Faber in 1962. That same year, Signet books, New American Library, also proposed publication; but the editor there said the manuscript was too long; they confined their books to 160 pages. Maybe it was 160 pages. Anyhow, they proposed cutting out the section regarding the tummybelly men – the one humorous section. I wrote back politely, saying that if they planned to remove the tummybelly men, then I would take the manuscript elsewhere.
Later, I was pleased I had stood